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Amid the gloom about greying audiences, the financial problems faced by major organizations and the challenges facing presenters, some exciting developments have been stirred into the complicated mix that is 21st-century classical music.

If predicting the future is risky business, the start of the 2013-14 season is a good moment to consider where classical music is headed and how this is playing out on local turf.

The Sun recently asked a trio of stakeholders in Vancouver’s music scene what they thought were the new trends in classical music.

Three ideas stand out: The role of the “historically informed” performance (and how it has evolved), the move beyond a “Western European” concept of classical music, and the rise of new post-classical esthetics.

As the newly appointed artistic director of Early Music Vancouver, Matthew White certainly knows about the first issue: His organization has made Vancouver a major player in early music and historical circles. What is noteworthy is how authentic instruments and music history ideas keep creeping forward in time.

Later this month, EMV will launch its season with performances of Schubert, material that used to be the undisputed province of conventional classical artists.

“My plan,” White said, “is to continue offering a wide range of music from the early medieval period all the way up to contemporary music that is related to our core repertoire. I don’t really want to box myself in. Good music is good music — period.”

It is interesting to witness how younger mainstream performers have learned from the early music movement.

Two recent concert highlights in Vancouver were performances by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov of all the Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin, and an evening of 19th-century songs by tenor Joshua Hopkins, with 19th-century fortepiano accompaniment.

Here were notable members of a new generation of performers brilliantly moving with the times and demonstrating what they had learned from the historical performance movement.

Blending cultures is another hot topic, one that features big time on EMV’s 2013-14 season, at the Vancouver Recital Society (which presents the Silk Road Ensemble), at the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s new Pacific Rim Celebration, and with an impressive number of local ensembles.

VSO composer-in-residence Edward Top speaks for many of his contemporaries: “I’d say that the composer of a Western music ‘tradition’ is seeking out techniques and sounds from other parts of the world. But this has been the case since Debussy; it’s not new, although a lot of music of over a hundred years old is still newer than what happens today, as we heard in several recent centennial celebrations. Personally, I’m currently experimenting with heterophony, something I’d done 15 years ago when I lived in Asia.”

Another trend is talking about “post-classical,” a term used to explain just how music is changing, and why. The idea that traditional lines of demarcation between genres and types of music are eroding is nowhere more evident than in the area of new composition, where many of the best and brightest no longer see themselves as belonging to one camp or another.

This trend got a lot of early traction with the so-called minimalists, who weren’t at all adverse to pop influences.

In Vancouver, Music on Main regularly pays a lot of attention to the grand old men of that style; a new work by the illustrious Philip Glass will be played by the Kronos Quartet at the Chan Centre this season. Listeners can certainly anticipate a post-classical vibe in many of the new works coming from the pens — or computers — of Vancouver’s plethora of younger composers.

Edward Top obviously thinks a lot about the state of classical music, acknowledging that the legacy of the experimental “avant garde” has, perhaps, been a mixed blessing. The “progressive and scientific” attitudes of the recent past are perhaps giving way to a new artistic climate where “beauty is replacing truth,” he said.

Top is prepared to go even further, addressing post-post-modernism: “I predict a shift of the modern arts to other parts of the world, where a completely new direction will replace the Western one.”

But adventurous explorations of human artistic expression, either rooted in our multiple pasts or from beyond traditional cultural boundaries, raise the crucial issue of how far the mainstream classical audience is ready and willing to go.

Speaking to that issue, Paris Simons, president of the Friends of Chamber Music board, sounded a note of reticence.

“A lively range of repertoire, from established classics to lesser-known works, is being offered by some touring ensembles, although that trend is offset by other groups offering only the ‘greatest hits’ of chamber music,” he said.

“A diminishing of the arts in public education is likely what pushes some artists (and their agents) toward narrowing the range of repertoire they wish to spend time and energy on. Otherwise, they could spend many hours of work on preparing music that no presenters will ask them to play during a tour.

“How many presenters will risk programming a Schulhoff or Ligeti string quartet? These are examples off the top of my head, and composers whose music is being presented in our coming season. Of course, there are exceptions, but it can be a difficult marketing venture for musicians.”

White and Simons also offer an unexpected new trend: Enlightened co-operation and collaboration between musicians, between ensembles, and between presenters.

A cursory look at the season to come shows a number of productive joint programs: The Vancouver Recital Society and Early Music Vancouver will present countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Thomas Dunford; Friends of Chamber Music and the Recital Society have a Brahms Festival in the works for next year; and the VSO continues to explore ongoing collaborations with the University of British Columbia’s choral and opera programs.

The message here is a good one, and as apt an idea for the start of a new season as any: Changing times require changing strategies.

A willingness to move with the times, and a realization that all music stakeholders can gain more from co-operative ventures than from unproductive competition, are practical and productive new trends in our musical life.

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